Set against the cultural and political upheavals in China in the late 80s and early 90s, the narrative is at once a story about love, loss, and neoliberal capitalism. Yet to this day, the true author-variously referred to as Bei Tong, Miss Wang, Beijing Comrade, Ling-Hui, and Xiao He-remains a mystery.īeijing Comrades tells the story of Handong, a businessman with an outsized ego and sexual appetite, and his unexpected love affair with Lan Yu, a young man from the provinces who has come to the city to study architecture. This month, thanks to the Feminist Press, it is about to be published for the first time in English, under the title Beijing Comrades.
It would go on to be adapted into a movie by Stanley Kwan in 2001 and published in an edited print version in Taiwan in 2002. It was one of (if not the) first self-reflexively gay novels to be published in any form in mainland China, as well as the first Chinese novel to be written natively on the Internet. The book-originally called Dalu gushi ( A Story From the Mainland)-quickly gained cult fame in China's gay community. On September 22, 1998, the first installment of a gay erotic novel appeared on the now-defunct website Chinese Men's and Boys' Paradise ( Zhongguo nanren nanhai tiantang).
